Consumers are purchasing digital music and products to augment their digital music libraries at unprecedented rates. A combination of better music management and evolving digital rights management has created an environment where more music than ever is available legally, and creative tools to use that music are easily accessible.
An emotion may be felt by one individual toward another or it can be shared between two or more individuals. For many reasons, recordings may encapsulate many emotions. For example, the recording of an opera may contain emotions of the various roles in the opera. Expressing an emotion by singing a song can be traced back at least to the troubadours of the High Middle Ages (1100-1350). Song lyrics are crafted to describe a human emotion in a succinct and precise manner. The music encapsulating an emotive lyric shades and intensifies the description. The analog of the troubadour in the modern age is to communicate the emotion by sending a recording of the song encapsulating the emotion. However, the market offerings for creating a snippet of song that represents a particular emotion or set of feelings are scarce. Existing services have categorized a limited number of audio files harvested from various public Internet sites. Often the harvested files do not include the entire original work. Frequently, the harvested files were unlicensed copies themselves and many times the audio quality is poor. Thus, there is a need for a service that can provide access to licensed audio that allows for the clipping of that audio into licensed clips, so that users and providers associated with these transactions are not in violation of copyright laws. Involvement with an unlicensed system could damage the businesses reputation and that of any sponsors.
Existing services require that a user listen to the entire audio file (or prior users' previously created clips) to determine a clip start and stop time for a portion of the song they wish to clip. There have long been means and methods for a human operator to examine a digital recording and to clip a pre-specified lyric phrase out of the recording. There are, for example, recording studios that contain hardware devices for the editing of recorded music including listening to the music and clipping out certain segments of recordings. There are also software programs that enable the user to listen to digitally recorded music on a home computer and to clip out segments from digital media. Many of these options require access to specialized hardware and/or software and may further require the user to possess the expertise to operate the hardware and/or software to achieve the desired result. The few generally available options are cumbersome, which makes creating the audio clips time-consuming and difficult, particularly for novice users.
There is a need in the art to provide users with a way to find the specific feeling they are looking to express from within the music. There is an associated need to provide selectable lyrics that may be preferably searchable. There is a further desire to provide potentially easier alternatives to quickly locate a desired portion of a song.
Accordingly there is a need for a system that would provide even novice users the functionality to identify a recording containing a desired lyric phrase, get a clip of that lyric phrase and facilitate the transmission of that audio clip via email, text, IM or other means of electronic—particularly one-to-one (or peer-to-peer) communication as opposed to one-to-many sites that allow users to post song segments that are meaningful to them.
Mobile phone use and music consumption and involvement show a concrete connection that has experienced rapid growth much along the lines of mobile messaging services. A 2010 Pew Research study indicated that 33% of mobile subscribers use their phone for music—that number is 3% more than those who use instant messaging and 4% more than application use. Consumers will come to know and expect richer communication experiences from their smartphones. Thus, there is an opportunity to leverage this mobile phone usage for musical playback and messaging.
Many e-greeting services have already taken advantage of increasing mobile internet use. Industry experts predict that mobile greetings including unique services for youth, dating and special interests will generate over $100 M in revenue between 2010 and 2013. However, none of these e-greeting services have filled the needs noted above.